All the arguments about reward for risk are spurious when there is no penalty for failure. In Tudor times, Fred Goodwin's head would have been chopped off, parboiled and placed on a pike.

History is about places of the mind. Is my memory of the Tudor court any less real than my memory of my childhood home, which now looks completely different, differently furnished and lived in by different people?

I come from a working-class background in Kendal, a right tight little town. You were called an "off-comer" if you'd lived there 50 years, but hadn't been born there.

The English seem to be rather unusual in the world. Dating back even to Chaucer's time they associate affection with marriage. In this sense, Henry was typically English, he wanted to love his wives. As he fell out of love with them he had this modern notion that he should get out of the marriage.

My mother was the dominant figure of my upbringing. She was a literate charwoman and a frustrated teacher. She made sure I had the books, the desk and the silences in order to work.

I was born a cripple, with two club feet, and mild polio in the left leg. I was in orthopaedic boots right through to my teenage years and, unfortunately, the fashion then was for light shoes. I discovered very quickly that I had a sharp mind and an exceedingly sharp tongue.

Henry was very upset when he discovered that Catherine Howard had had lots of premarital sex. If he'd bothered to think about it he might have wondered how she was so good at it, which the legal depositions of the time make it very clear that she was.

I was different: different because I didn't come from the town, different because I was bookish, different because I didn't like games, different because I was a Quaker. It's no bad thing to get inoculated to the consequences of being different early on, everyone who does anything interesting is a little bit off-beat.

Not to invent yourself is to be false. To follow preordained rules is a profound betrayal of what it means to be human.

Academics aren't paid very much, but as a single gay man I was never badly off. You don't have kids. You don't have a non-working wife's insatiable demand for shoes or wallpaper.

The ringing accolade on which the whole of my broadcasting career is based came from a former student of mine who went into TV and told his boss: "I suppose David Starkey is the least boring historian in Cambridge."

I was outrageous on the Moral Maze. The closest I sailed to the wind was when I almost outed a most saintly Cardinal in a talk on homosexuality in public life.

Like a lot of intellectuals I had a prolonged late-adolescence. There were long hot summers on Hampstead Heath in the 70s, which were absolutely magically beautiful, like scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. The heath was as tightly regionalised and governed by etiquette as an early modern court. The upper bit by Jack Straw's Castle was for the junior year, then as you went down towards the ponds the sex got heavier and heavier and more and more leathery.

A month or two ago an old friend of mine said rather quizzically, "David, success has made quite a nice person of you."